Rising labor force participation among mothers of young children since the 1970s and the passage of strict work requirements for welfare recipients in 1996 have increased scholarly attention to the challenge of balancing the often conflicting demands of work and family. This challenge may be...

Qualitative research points to logistical problems in coordinating child care as a key obstacle to maternal employment for low-income mothers. But quantitative research has largely overlooked this everyday aspect of combining work and family. This article provides quantitative analyses of...

In this paper, we study the 20 percent of unmarried mothers in the U.S. who have attended college. We ask whether these women constitute a distinct subgroup of unmarried mothers in terms of their attitudes toward marriage and men, the characteristics of their partners or the age at which they...

Survey data indicate that Americans have become increasingly accepting of single-parent families formed through divorce and non-marital childbearing since 1960 (Thornton 1989; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001; Pagnini and Rindfuss 1993). But knowledge of attitudes about single-parent families is limited...

Data with which to study disability dynamics usually take the form of successive current-status measures of disability rather than a record of events or spell durations. One recent paper presented a semi-Markov model of disability dynamics in which spell durations were inferred from sequences of...

Tax and transfer programs inevitably create incentives relating to the size and composition of households. Examples of such incentives are the "marriage penalty," dependents exemptions, and the eligibility rules for categorical welfare programs. This paper notes that changes in transfer program...